Before & After Redesigns of Popular Design Blogs

There’s a lot to be learned by looking at before and after shots of a website’s redesign. You get to see what the designer or design team has learned about design since the last rendition, where they’ve identified problems and areas of the design that could be improved. The site’s look and feel is brought up to date with trends, and often more timeless improvements are made, such as base typography enhancements.

Examining these changes can help you take advantage of the designer’s learning through trial and error and other means and avoid having to make the same mistakes yourself. Here are 30 popular design blogs that have been redesigned over the past few years for your viewing pleasure.

WebDesignerWall

Before:

After:

Veerle’s Blog

Before:

After:

Tutorial9

Before:

After:

UX Booth

Before:

After:

InspiredMag

Before:

After:

Lord Likely

Before:

After:

Fudgegraphics

Before:

After:

WorkAwesome

Before:

After:

LINE25

Before:

After:

SimpleBits

Before:

After:

Francesco Mugnai

Before:

After:

Speckyboy Design Magazine

Before:

After:

1st Web Designer

Before:

After:

The Design Buzz

Before:

After:

Onextrapixel

Before:

After:

Abduzeedo

Before:

After:

UsabilityPost

Before:

After:

PVM Garage

Before:

After:

Wegraphics

Before:

After:

Janko at Warp Speed

Before:

After:

Visualswirl

Before:

After:

Web Design Ledger

Before:

After:

Think Vitamin

Before:

After:

Dawghouse Design Studio

Before:

After:

Spyrestudios

Before:

After:

AppStorm

Before:

After:

Cats who Blog

Before:

After:

Under World Magazines

Before:

After:

Smashing Magazine

Before:

After:

Elite By Design

Before:

After:

Mashable

Before:

After:

Conclusion

Much of what you see here is designers keeping up with web design trends before their work looks dated. In the last year or so, many of the redesigns would’ve been about taking advantage of new technologies such as CSS3, allowing designers to accomplish completely new things, or just replace hacks that weren’t exactly standards-compliant with proper implementations.

But what you can see in each and every design is the process of designers learning and growing and honing their skills through iteration. Let us know in the comments your thoughts on where these redesigns hit, where they missed, and what you might have done differently.

You might also like...

Hannah is the founder and curator of moobileframes.tumblr.com, a collection of wireframes, sketches and user interface drawings that focuses on mobile applications. You can follow her @humbleuidesigns or on her Tumblelog (humbleuidesigns.tumblr.com).